Although the present invention may be applied in many technical fields in which a time-variable entity is processed by providing a number of resources varying in time, the invention will be described with reference to a business environment such as a call center or a User Helpdesk (UHD), where the varying workload is defined by a varying number of incoming calls or e-mail correspondence or any other type of user-initiated requests.
Such a situation is structurally depicted in the schematic representation of FIG. 1 with special reference to a User Helpdesk. In general, resources 14A-14F provided for satisfying the varying workload of incoming calls can be any devices arranged for operating successfully with the workload. In the application field mentioned above, the resources 14 are in particular phone call answering staff and computing/phone units such as personal computers having integrated phone devices that the staff works with. Usually, this happens in a networked environment, which provides the possibility to include a plurality of geographical locations in the UHD, the staff of which may be combined to cover a given, current UHD workload.
Often, the inner structure of a User Helpdesk comprises staff in a “Frontdesk” area 10 that connects to a specialist staff member working in a Backdesk area 12A-12E according to a respective subject matter of a given user problem. A personal computer 16 is coupled to the User Helpdesk configuration so that it is able to track the number, time and duration of incoming calls in order to store such statistical data and to provide a computational base for repeated and possibly permanent workload evaluation with permanently updated prognosis.
An example of such a method and system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,911,134.
The aforementioned patent addresses the problem of insufficient flexibility of workload forecast systems that are unable to give a quick and accurate response to changing boundary conditions in order to forecast future call loads and to provide a realistic scheduling of staff, in order to meet the dynamic load requirements of, for example, a telephone call center.
Instead of time-series forecasting the workload in large blocks of time and then using fixed factors to decompose a monthly forecast into weekly, daily and hourly increments, the U.S. patent teaches subdividing a team of agents into management units (MU) which may be generally located at different physical locations but which may cooperate with each other in order to satisfy workload peaks, for example. Further, the patent proposes using real-time performance statistics and displaying agent schedules to improve efficiency.
A force management system according to U.S. Pat. No. 5,911,134 uses a central computer to manage the cooperation of the management units and to keep track of staffing changes. Staffing changes are transmitted from a local team to the centralized computer, which regularly issues updated working schedules to the management units. The prediction algorithm is based on the Erlang C method modified by some variation or optimization of the required staff by weighted average factors.
The method of U.S. Pat. No. 5,911,134, although covering seasonality and calendar factors in order to adapt the fluctuations of different seasons and calendar-based characteristics, is not precise enough and not flexible enough to predict a future workload in a satisfying manner. Further, the approach proposed therein is not general enough for integrating other important parameters required for providing a satisfying prediction, as for example the different skills of staff, the differences between Frontdesk work and Backdesk work, the effects of training courses completed by the staff and in particular the trend which has been set in the varying workload time series data by the most recent past.